THE HOLOCAUST
TEACHING LESSON 4

Handout 4A: Gizella in the Ghetto

Handout 4B: Anatoly

Vocabulary:    ghetto

Either the teacher or a student can summarize Overview 4 for students. Tell the class that in this lesson they will learn from first-hand accounts of survivors about the mistreatment of Jews during Holocaust. Review the definition of a ghetto with the class. Emphasize that the ghettos created by the Nazis were not like the ghettos the Jews had lived in during the Middle Ages. The medieval ghettos protected Jews and their institutions. Within them, Jews were able to study, pray, and socialize as they pleased. The ghettos devised by the Nazis were a part of the Nazi extermination plan. In Polish ghettos like Warsaw and Lodz, residents were sealed inside. Tens of thousands died of starvation, overcrowding, exposure to cold, and epidemics of typhoid and other diseases. Ghettos provided a pool of forced labor for the Germans. Many ghetto residents toiled on road gangs or building crews or performed other forms of hard labor that supported the German war effort. Thousands were worked to death in the ghettos.

Give half the class Handout 4A and the other half Handout 4B. Tell the students with Handout 4A that Gizella lived in Poland in 1939 when the Nazis invaded her country. She was ten years old. Explain to students with Handout 4B that Anatoly lived in the Ukraine, which was a part of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the war. During fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union, the Germans captured Ukraine. After students have read their handouts, use these questions to summarize and compare the two readings.

1. How did the person you read about get to the ghetto? Who sent them? Why?
2. What were the most serious problems people in the ghetto faced? Judging by what you read, what were the worst aspects of ghetto life?
3. How did people in the ghetto obtain food?

The group with Handout 4A can also be asked:

1. Where do you think the trucks that took the people out of the ghettos were going?  
2. Why were the people taken from the ghetto forced to write postcards to those left behind?

The group with Handout 4B can consider:

1. Why didn’t Anatoly’s family try to escape when the Germans took over his city?
2. What two things helped Anatoly survive in the ghetto?

This group can also contrast the way Ukrainians and Rumanians treated the people in the ghetto.

To illustrate the crowded conditions in the ghetto, explain that one of the largest ghettos, the Warsaw Ghetto, was about 1⅓ square miles in area. Identify an area within your community that is about 1⅓ square miles. A university campus or a residential neighborhood might be an example. Choose an area students are familiar with. Estimate the number of people living in this area. Then explain that in this area where (use the statistics for your community) live, the Nazis put anywhere from 330,000 to 500,000 people. This is more than the population of Raleigh, Greensboro, or Winston-Salem. Students can also imagine what it would be like to have twenty extra people living in their home.  

Conclude by looking at the effects of ghetto life on both the people living within the ghetto and those on the outside. Ghetto life isolated Jews and set them apart from other citizens. Putting people in the ghettos, forcing them to wear the Yellow Star, depriving them of food, medicine, and sanitary facilities—all were methods of dehumanization. The goal of this treatment was to make both Jews and non-Jews feel that this group was inferior. Making Jews “less than human” helped anti-Semites justify their treatment of them.  

Students often ask why more prisoners of the ghetto didn’t attempt to escape.   Explore this question with the class. (Ghetto life deprived its victims of their dignity, their resources, and their health. Many believed this imprisonment was temporary and would end when Germans came to their senses and rejected Nazi rule. Many were old and sickly, and most had no other place to go. Even if residents could have escaped from the ghetto, few countries would accept them.   The United States and Britain had strict quotas limiting the number of immigrants from Germany and eastern Europe. Even if these nations had been willing to accept Jews, there was no way to get them out. Almost all shipping was military with few civilian transports.)

Connect to American History:   Examine with the class the ways people with strong prejudices attempt to make the victims of their bigotry seem less than human. Techniques range from ethnic and racial jokes and cartoons to segregation by law and denial of access to economic and educational opportunities. Parallels may be drawn to the black codes and laws that dehumanized African Americans during slavery and in the post-Reconstruction period, to the depiction of Chinese Americans in cartoons and newspapers, and to the apartheid “pass laws,” which forced black South Africans to carry special travel permits.

Published in cooperation with the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust
Copyright © 2002 by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust. Updated 2005.
North Carolina Department of Public Instruction
http://www.ncpublicschools.org/holocaust_council/